Applying Lateral Wisdom to Personal, Organizational, and Church Learning

School Culture

October 12, 2010

The 18th Century was the time of the "Enlightenment." In response, education created the essential subjects.

The 19th Century was the time of the "farm." In response, education calendared and timed itself to planting and harvesting.

The 20th Century was the time of the "factory." In response, education became a system and process to be managed and measured.

The 21st Century is the time of the idea. In response, education doubled-down on the previous three centuries with common core and national standards, committment to limited school day and summers off, and nationalized standardized testing (NCLB, RTTT)

September 02, 2010

School change is a challenging, necessary, and sticky business. Too often though, it begins with the search for the negative. Putting on, as thinking expert Edward de Bono would say, our “Black Hat.”

It’s a story that has been told a thousand times. A school needs to improve, to “fix what is broken” and it is up to the principal to identify what isn’t working, develop a plan to improve or repair the issues, and maybe hires a few consultants along the way to help.

What if, we started with de Bono’s “Yellow Hat?” Might the search for solutions began with finding those people at the school who are already succeeding and thriving in spite of the challenges and obstacles they face?

“Somewhere in your organization, groups of people are already doing things differently and better. To create lasting change, find areas of positive deviance and fan their flames.”

Here is an “uncommon sense” approach to school change adapted from their article.

Traditional Approach To School Change

Positive Deviance Approach To School Change

Principal or Administrator as Path BreakerPrimary ownership and momentum for the school change comes from the principal's office. Teachers and staff leave it up to principal to discover what isn't working and fix it.

Leadership as InquiryPrincipal or administrator facilitates search; the school staff takes ownership of the quest for change. The teachers look around for positive deviance, those teachers, departments, or grade levels that are doing it differently and better.

Outside InOutside consultants are hired to identify and share best practices.

Inside OutSchool staff looks for and identifies preexisting solutions (what is working) and amplifies them across the school.

Deficit BasedPrincipal deconstructs common practices and recommends best-practice solutions. The implication to teachers is "Why aren't you as good as your peers?"

Asset BasedTeachers and staff leverage preexisting solutions practiced by those teachers who succeed against the odds.

Logic DrivenTeachers "think" into new ways of teaching and instructing.

Learning DrivenTeachers teach and instruct into new ways of "thinking."

Vulnerable To Transplant RejectionResistance arises from ideas imported or imposed from outside consultants and or district office.

Open To Self-ReplicationLatent wisdom and knowledge of teachers and staff on site is tapped within the school walls to circumvent the school's culture/social reaction to outsiders.

Flows From Problem Solving To Solution IdentificationBest practices are applied to problems defined within the context of existing parameters.

Flows From Solution Identification To Problem SolvingPossible source of solutions is expanded through discovery of new parameters.

Focused On The ProtagonistEngages school stakeholders who would be conventionally associated with the problem.

Focused On Enlarging The NetworkIdentifies school stakeholders beyond those directly involved with the problem.

August 16, 2010

No organization should be better at learning than the organizations that teach people how to learn. Therefore, it would follow that education should be the best organization in terms of learning ability of capability.

On this post (Innovation = Learning) on his blog, Keith Sawyer discusses an article in the Fall 2007 issue of Sloan Management Review, by Joaquín Alegre and Ricardo Chiva. They studied organizations high in organizational learning capability (OLC) and identified five core features of high OLC companies:

Keith shares some of his thoughts from his research on each of the five core features.

(1) Experimentation: “Experimentation as defined by these authors, produces a flow of new ideas that challenge the established order.”

Does education tend to toward challenging the established order or supporting the established order?

(2) Risk taking:“Risk taking is just what it sounds like: the tolerance for ambiguity and errors. And as I’ve found, innovative organizations foster idea generation and tolerate failure.”

Does education posses a tolerance for ambiguity and errors. Does education foster idea generation and in what ways does it to do this. How about tolerating failure? Where does education fall on the spectrum or encouraging or discouraging ideas with the potential to fail?

(3) Interaction with the external environment: “Interaction with the external environment is what I call “collaborating with customers” and is associated with innovative networks that I call collaborative webs in my book Group Genius. Deborah Ancona, in her 2007 book X-Teams, has likewise discovered that successful teams have an outward focus, and strong social network ties with people outside of their team.”

Has education developed an outward focus? In what ways has education collaborated with its “customer base?” How has education fostered strong social networks with people outside of their classrooms, schools, and districts?

(4) Dialogue and (5) participative decision making: “Dialogue and participative decision making are what I call improvisation–a style of communication and an organizational culture that is egalitarian, open to flows across status levels. Improvisational organizations excel at a type of dialogue that opens up possibilities, a style of conversation in which new and unexpected ideas emerge.”

In what ways has education embraced dialogue and participative decision making? How could education benefit from a greater use of dialogue and participative decision making? Does education encourage idea sharing across job functions and management levels?

Keith concludes by saying, “I firmly believe that organizations high in learning ability are more likely to be innovative organizations, and I’m delighted to read of this fascinating study confirming the link.”

I too hope that education has developed a high learning ability because we need all the innovation we can get. I think the jury is still out whether we who are high in teaching ability are also high in learning ability. I would like to to think we are.

It also makes me wonder if we are giving students enough opportunities to experiment, take risks, interact with the external (outside of school) environment, dialogue, and participate in decision making. Certainly these skills are going to be necessary in the organizations that our students will one enter into, but shouldn't they be necessary right now in our classrooms?

June 29, 2010

“I
define difficult work as the stuff that takes guts or insight. It’s not
particularly dependent on how big your budget is or where you got a degree.
Designing the profile for the Chrysler Building was difficult. Building it was
hard.”

Hard
work is about the process.

Difficult
work
is about the innovation.

Hard

Difficult

Designing comprehensive standards based lesson plans

Deciding what the student needs isn't in the curriculum or the standards and then doing something about it

June 24, 2010

Growing
up I ate a lot of cereal. They were all pretty much the same. Day in and day
out I knew what to expect. Sometimes one box was bigger than the other or
sometimes on flake was shaped different from the other or one had a different
flavor than the others, but they all matched my expectation.

Occasionally,
though, there would be a box with a free prize inside and that would get me
excited. I would carefully examine the box thinking about what I might discover
inside. Then I would dive into the box and search for the prize by pouring out
bowl after bowl of the cereal to obtain my prize.

The
difference wasn’t more cereal, a different flavor, or even a different shape.
The difference was the free prize inside. The free prize made that box of
cereal remarkable because it added something unexpected, something different,
something more than just the bowl of cereal I expected. The free prize added
something I didn’t even know I needed with my breakfast.

So
I ask you, is your school remarkable? Do people talk about your school, tell
others about your school, or brag to others about your school or get people
excited?

Does
your school offer something people didn’t know they needed in a school? If so,
that is your free prize.

“Second,
a free prize is not about what a person needs. Instead, it satisfies our wants.
It is fashionable or fun or surprising or delightful or sad. It rarely delivers
more of what we were buying in the first place. It delivers something extra.”

If
you are thinking that people are going to be talking about how well your school
teaches the standards or how well it does on standardized tests or how you meet
the needs of every student through an effective RtI plan or how your teachers
collaborate or use curriculum—if that is what you are thinking, you better
think again.

That
is the price of admission. That is what is already expected. What is going to
get people talking about your school is the free prize inside.

I
worked at a school that did all these things, but did it through art, drama,
music, and dance. Students and parents got what they expected out of a school,
but they also got a free prize inside. They didn’t know they needed the arts
embedded and infused through the teaching and learning, but once they
experienced it they were delighted. They had some to remark about.

Another
school in my district is an Apple Distinguished School. It does everything a
great school should do, but it has a free prize inside. Every student, in every
grade level, in every subject matter, has the opportunity to use technology and
problem based learning. It’s remarkable. It’s a free prize.

I
worked at a school that involved families to such an extent that parents were
taking classes on campus, had their own “parent room”, held carnivals,
volunteered all over the campus, came to family picnics. Former students
frequently returned to visit their teachers. The teachers, parents, and
students embraced this so much that the entire campus became a family. It was noticeable, you could feel it. You
didn’t’ expect to find or become part of family, but that’s what happened. That
was the free prize inside.

Education
is becoming increasingly competitive. Parents have more and more choices for
their students. Is your school drawing parents and students to it? Are you
doing something remarkable?

Maybe
you have never considered how important marketing might be for your school in
the coming years. It is. Start thinking about it.

Is
your school doing something remarkable, unique, and meeting needs parents and
students didn’t know they had? Are you doing something worth buying?

February 22, 2010

I explored what frog designer Adam Richardson calls X-problems. In this post I go deeper into exploring the differences between wicked problems and X-problems.

Why is public education facing more than just wicked problems, but X-problems?

For public schools these X-problems might be a question of experience and expectation.

Adam Richardson, in his new book Innovation X, identified several factors that differentiate X-problems from wicked problems and as you will see they point to issues of experience and expectation in public schools.

More and Better Competition: The presence of competition, and competitors that are getting better and more diverse.

“The major element missing from the traditional definition of wicked problems is competition.”

Does public education have competition?

Private Schools

On-line virtual schools

Home School

“Certainly wicked problem address the issue of competition of stakeholders, but primarily stakeholders who have a common interest and will mutually benefit for the solution.”

The competition that public education is facing is expanding in number and diversity.

Private schools, on-line virtual schools, and home schools have no common interest with public schools. They compete for students and parent support alike. They attempt to differentiate themselves through the experience they provide and expectations they meet.

Public schools are teaching based institutions. That’s what they provide. Students are seeking learning and learning is not confined within the walls of public schools. Learning is becoming somewhat akin to the “cloud” of computing. As more and more great teaching goes online, students will be able to access more content, great content, in virtual and physical space. The learning cloud is going to provide fierce competition to public schools, especially at the secondary level. That is competition.

So the X-problem for public school is what do they do about it?

More Demanding Customers: The need to satisfy more demanding customers and provide superior customer experiences.

“The more informed our customers are and the higher their expectations, the better we will be positioned to demonstrate our differentiation.”

The public is the customer and private, on-line, and home schools are steadily eroding the monopoly that public schools have long held. We as a nation of discriminating consumers are no longer content with things that just work, we demand more. We demand design.

“These differentiation and expectation trends often translate into increased demand for aesthetic qualities of using a product, not just its raw functionality. As Daniel Pink has put it, ‘For business, it’s no longer enough to create a product that’s reasonably priced and adequately functional. It must also be beautiful, unique and meaningful.”

Who wants to send their student to a boring sterile institutionalized buildings, surrounded with fences, lacking any aesthetic beauty, with an crumbling physical infrastructure, out-dated technology and equipment, cramped spaces, etc?

“The term customer experience refers to the qualitative experience of using a new product: how easy it is to use, the emotions that are evoked by it both during and after use, the self-image that the customers feel they are projecting, and of course who well the product satisfies their needs and desires. The customer experience should be considered.”

When the public thinks of public schools do they think?

“…how a product does its job is now as important as what is does.”

Public schools are facing challenges on many fronts, but one of the ones that most education leaders and managers are ignoring is the “how.” It’s not going to be enough to just teach curriculum to students, society is going to demand more than just functional competency.

Nordstrom’s is more than just a department store. Apple desktops and laptops are more that just computers. Disneyland is more than just a few rides. They provide an experience. Does public education provide and experience? Yes, but is it the experience that society demands of them? It’s all about the experience.

Customer Expectations Are Resetting: The need to integrate products of diverse types and origins into comprehensive, coherent systems for customers.

“Customers no longer judge based on solely on comparison with direct competitors; they use standards set elsewhere: my satisfaction with a new dishwasher may be blunted by comparison to the ease of use of my iPod, for example.”

Take the examples I mentioned in the section above. Society is not just going to measure public school against public school or public school against private school, etc. Society is going to start measuring public school against the customer experience of a Nordstrom’s, or the encompassing emotional and sensory experience of a Disneyland. Society is not just going to compare the technology in school, but how that technology experience compares to the design and ease of use provided by the iPod and iTunes.

Systems, Not Products: The need to integrate products of diverse types and origins into comprehensive, coherent systems for customers.

“What often goes unrecognized is that every product is part of a system.”

Everything at our public school is a product, but is also part of a system. The problem for public schools is that the products are not being integrated to produce an excellent system. Different text, different standards, Curriculum covers things not on the test. The test assesses things not in the curriculum. New technology doesn’t work with old technology. They myriad of differences in policies, procedure, rules, regulations, organizations, etc. make it difficult teacher, student, and parent alike to navigate through all these differences.

Society is looking for results, but results with an experience. The system that has developed around public education provides varying results and virtually ignores experience. We are ignoring the “how” of what we do.

“Developing complex integrated systems is the new order, and it forces pieces of a company to come together and collaborate in ways that organizational silos had not previously required or even allowed.”

When a teacher, principal, or other school employees says to parent, “That’s just not the way it works.” Or “I can’t do that because we are not allowed.” or “I know it doesn’t make sense, but that is just the reality.” we demonstrating to the parent, to society, that our system won’t work for them. We are not able to provide the experience they seek or meet their expectations.

So what do we do?

Emergent Clarity: Clarity about the problem emerges slowly, as with wicked problems, but iterative approaches to solving them are necessary, in contrast to the one-shot deal of wicked problems.

In other words we need a lot of ideas, we need to try them, and we need to build on the ones that work and abandon those that don’t. Continually arguing about the one idea to solve it all is not going to move us forward. Government is usually lacking in ideas and loathe to abandon ideas that are not effective. Tweaking the edges is not going to solve the problems of public education.

The sooner public education begins the prototyping new models and methods, the sooner we can learn more about the very definition of the problem we face. Each prototype offers clarity and insight about the very nature of the problem. Without making attempts to solve public educations problems we are limiting our understanding of just what the problem is.

Clarity will emerge. The questions of experience and expectation can be answered.

February 08, 2010

"Our society is struggling because during times of change, the very last people you need on your team are well-paid bureaucrats, note takers literalists, manual readers, TGIF laborers, map followers, and fearful employees. The compliant masses don't help so much when you don't know what to do next."

Old System

"The system we grew up with is based on a simple formula: Do your job. Show up. Work hard. Listen to the boss. Stick it out. Be part of the system. You'll be rewarded."

"That's a scam."

"There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do."

ABC

"Thorton May correctly points out that we have reached the end of what he calls attendance-based compensation (ABC). There are fewer and fewer good jobs where you can get paid merely for showing up. Instead successful organizations are paying for people who make a difference and are shedding everyone else."

The truest determiner of teacher pay is not ability, performance, creativity, innovation, or initiative...it is simply..who got here first? Factory worker thinking. Old system thinking.

Factory Work

"Most white-collar workers wear white collars, but they're still working in the factory."

"They push a pencil or process an application or type on a keyboard instead of operating a drill press."

"But it is factory work."

"It's factory work because it's planned, controlled, and measured. It's factory work because you can optimize for productivity. These workers know what that they're going to do all day--and it's still morning."

If your schedule is laid out to the exact minute in pre-determined prescribed fashion, are you more factory worker or white collar knowledge worker?

I hope we are not turning Education into McDonalds. Everything done in the same way, following the same procedures simplified and standardized to eliminate judgment, and to produce the same results over and over. This kind of work does not require a knowledge worker it just requires labor.

The Pursuit of Interchangeability

"The essence of mass production is that every part is interchangeable. Time, space, men, motion, money, and material--each was made more efficient because every piece was predictable and separate. Ford's discipline was to avoid short-term gains in exchange for always seeking the interchangeable, always standardizing."

Standards of what should be taught-School, state, and federal standards

Standardized curriculum used.

Standards of how the curriculum should be implemented.

Standardized pacing.

Standardized time/minutes for each subject.

Standardized tests of what should be measured.

Standardized use of researched based strategies.

Standardized use of data collection.

Standardized plan of intervention. -RtI

Standardized method for collaboration- PLCs.

Standardized goals and purpose- NCLB and RTTT

Standards on teacher qualification- teacher credentials and education

Remember Seth’s warning..."There are no longer any great jobs where someone else tells you precisely what to do."

1. Parkinsons Law of Triviality – the amount of time an
organization spends discussing an issue is inversely proportional to its
importance.

In the Professional Learning Community setting, teachers are
often very happy to talk about planning, page numbers, dates, and the like.
These, while not unnecessary, pale in importance compared to examining student
learning, reviewing student achievement data, and making informed and effective
instructional decisions to meet the needs of all students. While it is easy to
talk about what you would like to teach and when you would like to teach, it
can be difficult for teachers to share results of their own teaching, their own
students, and have the hard but crucial conversations that flow from such
sharing.

Teachers are often reluctant to share their ideas about
effective instructional practices to meet the varying needs of students. Often
they are afraid that they will be "wrong." Talking about page numbers
and dates carries less risk.

2. Sayre's Law, which states that in any dispute, the
intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at
issue.

Arguing over which day to give an assessment or which
worksheet should be used is not proportional to the need to openly and frankly
discuss how students are doing in meeting their learning goals, what is not
working, and what should be done to correct it.

3. Student Syndrome – Apply yourself to a task only at the
last possible moment before the deadline, that people generally underestimate
how long a task will be, and generally people miss deadlines because they leave
things to the last minute.

Professional Learning Communities often wait for the last
minute or underestimate the amount of time that will be needed to complete
their work. It takes time, often more time than anticipated, to do the work of
a Professional Learning Community. While the time is well used, it is a common
mistake to misjudge the amount that will be needed to thoroughly review student
learning, examine data, and make effective instructional decisions.

Recommend applying Hofstadter's Law, coined by the cognitive
scientist Douglas Hofstadter: "It always takes longer than you expect,
even when you take into account Hofstadter's law."

4. Pareto Principle -The 80/20 rule applies to many
situations.

Sadly, in many Professional Learning Communities, 20% of the
members are contributing 80% of the ideas, wisdom, and knowledge to the team.
20% of the members are usually doing the work of researching effective
strategies, preparing assessments, etc.

Some Professional Learning Communities struggle with team
members who do not share ideas, do not share knowledge, do not share data, and
seemingly do anything they can not to participate or cooperate with the rest of
their team members. They are “hoarders.” In a hoarding culture, teachers and
schools keep their expertise, their knowledge, their ideas, and their
innovations to themselves. I call this the hoarding barrier. It is not a rule
that applies to every PLC, but to those it does apply to it is very harmful.

5. Maes-Garreau Law,– Any prediction about a favorable future technology falls just within
the expected lifespan of the person making it.

In other words, technology will one day make the work of the
Professional Learning Community so much easier. Members express the, "One
day our computers will able to take the data and tell us exactly what to
do." idea over and over. Maybe it will, but right now it doesn't, so focus
on what you are able to do with what you have. Not to say that looking to the
future of what technology might bring isn't important, but time in a PLC is so
limited, so it might be better served staying focused on the task at hand and
leaving the predictions to one's free time.

6. Rogers’ Experiential Learning Theory -- Rogers lists the
qualities of experiential learning as personal involvement, self-initiation,
learner evaluation, and pervasive effects on the learner. The theory suggests
that learner motivation and the relevance of the topics are keys to successful
learning.

If members of a Professional Learning Community are
interested in learning about the data, information, research, and knowledge
being shared then they are likely to be involved, want to do something with it,
evaluate themselves against what they have learned, and accept and be willing
to change based on it. If not, then they are likely not going to take anything
or apply anything from the PLC discussion.

7. Information Cascade- Wikipedia explains, "An
information (or informational) cascade occurs when people observe the actions
of others and then make the same choice that the others have made,
independently of their own private information signals. Because it is usually
sensible to do what other people are doing, the phenomenon is assumed to be the
result of rational choice. Nevertheless, information cascades can sometimes
lead to arbitrary or even erroneous decisions. The concept of information
cascades is based on observational learning theory and was formally introduced
in a 1992 article by Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, and Ivo
Welch"

Have you ever considered that the first person in a PLC to
share an idea, their knowledge, their opinion, or give input to their
Professional Learning Community may create a sequence of events that prevent
the PLC from making the strongest most informed decisions possible?

Who speaks in a PLC matters. Who speaks first in a PLC
matters too.

Many Professional Learning Communities succumb to a problem
with the information cascade when the fail to get all of the available
information from each teacher. If you start with an incomplete picture of what
students are achieving, or what the best teaching strategy needed is, then the
PLC is bound to end up making a decision that is not a good as it could be
because that decision is based on incomplete information.

Finally, there is one more that I mention only for your
awareness and as food for thought.

8. Peter Principle, which states that in any organization
"people reach the level of their own incompetence"

Let's hope this has nothing to do with your Professional
Learning Community, but this principle exists for a reason; so just bear that
in mind. In your PLC, that person might be you!

Do any of these jump out at you? One of the least obvious for
education is number 9, Idea and Knowledge Management. Too many teachers
are spending too much time in their rooms and not enough time sharing
their ideas, knowledge, and wisdom. Too many principals and educational
managers are not encouraging or putting in place systems for formal
sharing of ideas and knowledge.

Technology
allows teams to connect to islands of expertise located in any
geographic location. Technology allows teams to archive their learning
and share with others. Knowing what others know and sharing what you have
learned is what I refer to as Wisdom Stewardship. Technology makes it
easy for educators and schools to be good stewards of available wisdom
and to know what others know. This is the where I see PLCs transitioning to Professional Networked Learning Collaboratives, designed with knowledge management in mind. The sum result is that technology allows the
Professional Networked Learning Collaborative to “Know What Others
Know” (K.W.O.K.).

No school staff knows how much they know until they know what each other knows. (Read it again!)

Catalytic Questions:

What places are you failing to look for ideas or answers to problems?

In what ways could you get curious about what your staff knows?

How might your assumptions about knowledge and ideas be getting in the way of learning from your staff?

What if you were able to know everything your staff knows. How might that change instruction at your school?

What might you have done in the past that could be applied to Idea and Knowledge Management at your school site?

What resources or solutions are available to you that you may have overlooked?

December 01, 2009

Innovation should not be linear. Most of us are familiar with examples of the great innovation teams from the business and engineering world. Examples such as Xerox- PARC’s group, to Apple’s Macintosh group, to Lockheed Martin’s famous “Skunk Works” have lead many of us to believe that innovative ideas should be developed by groups of “creative people” somewhere outside of school and then be brought into the school for teachers and administrators to execute. That is linear innovation and linear innovation should not be the goal of schools and school districts. Innovation should not be separated from schools and the district.

“If innovation is linear, the idea stage can be separated out and placed in a more creative unit of the organization, and the execution can still take place in a more traditional bureaucratic structure.”

Many of us have been conditioned to believe this is the way is should work in our schools. Let the experts come up with the ideas and then tell us what to do. But if we allow that mindset to continue then the schools or school districts never develop the capacity to bring their creativity, knowledge, and ideas to bear. Simply sitting back and waiting for other to think it up for us does nothing to develop innovation abilities.

Sawyer points out that,"... although separation can be good for short-term creativity, it interferes with long term innovation: An isolated “skunk works” usually has trouble communicating with the rest of the organization because innovation requires collaboration across the company.”

In other words, for the long-term benefit of the school or district, the best innovation is not linear, but lateral. We need to innovation and create together because everyone at the school or in the district is needed to collaborate on the new idea of innovation to effectively implement it and embed it. Collaborating laterally, across the team, the grade level, the department, the school, and the district.

Different cultures, different styles of communication, and different perspectives are natural barriers to those on the outside of the school or district. It makes it difficult to interface with the school or district, which are being asked to execute their innovations.

“The skunk works model places all its hope on one big flash of inspiration that must come from a select group of special people. But we’ve seen that even the most transformative new products and systems emerge from many small sparks of insight. Successful innovative companies keep these small sparks inspiring the next one.”

Lateral innovation occurs when teacher and administrators working next to each other day-in and day-out collaborate on these “small sparks” of insight and inspiration to produce innovation from within. These innovations are more likely to overcome the barriers that innovation from outside faces. Lateral innovation has more buy-in, is more contextual, and more focused.

If you want to make innovation a strength and capacity of your school or district, don’t look outside for linear innovation, but look inside for lateral innovation.